Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a zoom lens, and particularly to a projection zoom lens to be applied to a projection type display device.
Further, the present invention relates to a projection type display device equipped with such a projection zoom lens.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, projection type display devices that utilize light valves, such as liquid crystal display elements, DMD's (Digital Micromirror Device: registered trademark), or the like have been widespread. Further, in recent years, movie theaters and the like have been using such projection type display devices, which are designed to be capable of being applied to large screens and of producing high-definition images.
Such projection type display devices to be utilized in movie theaters and the like as described above have been required to have long back focus and a favorable telecentricity. This is because such projection type display devices adopt a three-plate system in which three light valves for the respective primary colors are provided. In the three-plate system, a light beam from the light source is divided into three primary colors by a color separation optical system, and the separated light of the three colors passes through the respective light valves and then is composed by a color composition optical system to be projected.
Further, such projection type display devices to be utilized in movie theaters and the like have been required to be equipped with high zoom-ratio zoom lenses as a projection lens. This aims at fitting the size of display images to a screen size in accordance with the projector distances and screen sizes, which differ depending on movie theaters, halls, and in accordance with aspect ratios (cinema scope, Vista size) of display images.
Further, there are many cases that such projection zoom lenses are required to maintain constant numerical apertures (hereinafter, referred to as “F number(s)” as well) over the entire zoom range. This is because operating in such a manner can prevent the brightness of display images from changing when the zoom ratios of this type of zoom lens are changed to match the sizes described above.
Further, accompanying the rapid pace of digitalization of cinema screens, projection type display devices have been rapidly miniaturized and reduced in cost. There is also likely to be demand for projection zoom lenses to be miniaturized and reduced in cost in addition to the demands for back focus, telecentricity, and high zoom ratio.
Patent Documents 1 and 2 (Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-128683 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2012-058607) disclose projection zoom lenses which are configured to maintain the numerical apertures constant over the entire zoom ranges.